Of the Amnesty report, Patrick Cockburn (Independent) observes, "Forced confessions are at the heart of the present legal system with
prisoners being given life and death sentences on the basis of false
statements extracted by torture. In one case last year, cited by
Amnesty, four men were arrested in Ramadi, held incommunicado and
tortured by various means, including being hung up by the wrists and
beatings, until they confessed." Carsten Jugernsen is with Amnesty International Germany and he tells DPA of the report,
"Neither the Iraqi government nor the former occupying power act
according to basic standards of human rights, and the people of Iraq are
paying the price for that." Holly Yan (CNN) notes, "The report said government forces commit torture with impunity,
targeting particularly those arrested on suspicion of carrying out
terrorism acts."

Olivia Ward (Canada's Spec) notes:Early last September, Mundhir al-Bilawi and his father were stopped
at a checkpoint in the Iraqi town of Ramadi and seized by security
forces. Then, said the 13-year-old, they were tortured with electric
shocks. He told a lawyer he was pressured to
denounce his father, a local pharmacist, as a terrorist — in the
presence of an investigating judge. Mundhir’s father, 38-year-old Samir
Naji Awda al-Bilawi, died in custody, and an autopsy confirmed that he
had been tortured to death. But the family’s pleas to name the torturers
and bring them and their superiors to justice have been ignored.

Tim Moynihan (Scotsman) notes the
report "highlights the case of Ramze Shihab Ahmed, a 70-year-old dual
Iraqi-UK
national who was given a 15-year jail sentence after a hearing that
lasted only 15 minutes." A really important report. Maybe in a week or
17 more days, Media Matters can find it? Probably not. Despite having
an hour to fill, Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! couldn't note
the report -- not even in a headline. See, it's easy to note what Media
Matters notes because they present it as the distant past. To address
what is actually taking place in Iraq? That might lead to criticism of
President Barack Obama and they just will not tolerate that. Writing
about whistle blower and political prisoner Bradley Manning last week, Naomi Spencer (WSWS) points out
that these alleged lefties can't summon the nerve to call out Barack,
"Organizations that orbit the Obama administration-- including the
International Socialist Organization, which has published a handful of
articles about the case -- have likewise avoided uttering the name of
Manning’s oppressor: the Democratic administration of Barack Obama. The
most recent report in the Socialist Worker, the ISO’s publication, was a reprint of a February 22 Belfast Telegraph op-ed which made no mention of Obama." The Voice of Russia (link is audio) explores what so many in the US are ignoring. Excerpt.Brendan
Cole: It may be a decade since the fall of Saddam [Hussein, former
President of Iraq] but violation of human rights in Iraq are still
rife. That's according to Amnesty International whose report says that
attacks on civilians, the torture of detainees and unfair trials are
still prevalent. It found government forces commit torture with
impunity especially against those accused of carrying out acts of
terrorism. Methods of torture include electrical shocks, partial
suffocation, beatings and the deprivation of food, water and sleep.
Carsten Jugernsen is the author of that Amnesty International report and
he said torture has always been widespread in Iraq but now forced
confessions were at the heart of the country's present legal system.

Carsten
Jugernsen: And we hear over and over again that this torture is done
to coerce suspects to confess, to confess to all sorts of crimes,
torture crimes, but also other crimes. Then again, we hear confessions
which are made under these circumstances and which are later withdrawn
are yet used in the trials as evidence against people and people have
been sentenced to very harsh sentences including to death.

Brendan
Cole: He said that thousands of Iraqis were detained without trial or
serving prison sentences after unfair trials and now Iraq was one of the
world's leading executioners. Last year, 129 Iraqi prisoners were
hanged.

It's
strange how silent they are, these sudden obsessive types. But then
it's so much easier to attack a woman and to join in on Bash The Bitch,
right? A lot harder to call out torture. Bad teethed Peter Maass is
one of the ones who attacked Kathryn and her film. Let's drop back to Maass' article for The New York Times Sunday Magazine (May 1, 2005):

The program we were
watching was Adnan's brainchild, and in just a few months it had proved
to be one of the most effective psychological operations of the war. It
is reality TV of sorts, a show called ''Terrorism in the Grip of
Justice.'' It features detainees confessing to various crimes. The show
was first broadcast earlier this year and has quickly become a
nationwide hit. It is on every day in prime time on Al Iraqiya, the
American-financed national TV station, and when it is on, people across
the country can be found gathered around their television sets.
[One paragraph deleted by me because we have not treated the videos as
reality and I'm not going to include his mocking descriptions of people
who were tortrued to get 'confessions.']
Before the show began that evening, Adnan's office was a hive of
conversation, phone calls and tea-drinking. Along with a dozen
commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including
James Steele, one of the United States military's top experts on
counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces
mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the
1980's. Steele's presence was a sign not only of the commandos' crucial
role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close
relationship with Adnan. Steele admired the general. ''He's obviously a
natural type of commander,'' Steele told me. ''He commands respect.''
Things quieted in the office once the episode of ''Terrorism in the Grip
of Justice'' began. First, a detainee admitted [deleted by me for the
same reason as before] and their confessions were taped, just hours
before, in this
very office. Adnan sat smoking Royals and watching the show like a proud
producer.
''It has a good effect on civilians,'' he had told me, through an
interpreter. ''Most civilians don't know who conducts the terrorist
activities. Now they can see the quality of the insurgents.'' Earlier he
said: ''Civilians must know that these people who call themselves
resisters are thieves and looters. They are dirty. In every person there
is good and bad, but in these people there is only bad.''
The episodes of the program I have seen depict an insurgency composed
almost entirely of criminals and religious fanatics. The insurgency as
understood by American intelligence officers, is a more complex web of
interests and fighters. Most of the insurgency is composed of Sunnis,
and it is generally believed that Baathists hold key positions. But the
commandos, who are the stars of ''Terrorism in the Grip of Justice,''
are also led by Sunnis and have many former Baathists in their ranks, so
the Sunni and Baathist aspect of the insurgency is carefully obscured.
Of course, propaganda need not be wholly accurate to be effective. The
real problem with the program, according to its most vocal critics --
representatives of human rights groups -- is that it violates the Geneva
Conventions. The detainees shown on ''Terrorism in the Grip of
Justice'' have not been charged before judicial authorities, and they
appear to be confessing under duress.

That's the real problem? That no charges have been brought? Seems
to me if Peter Maass wants to slam Kathryn Bigelow, he better have
called out torture when he 'reported' on it. (It's a first person,
feature article, it's not reporting -- not even what passes for magazine
reporting. It reads like Are You There Saddam? It's Me Peter.)

We've
called out torture from the start. Not just because it's 'ineffective'
but also because it's unethical. It torments the victim and it
dehumanizes the oppressor. It destroys who we are as a people and leads
us down a pathway that is hard to return from. The breaking of laws is
not the issue. Breaking laws just go to the fact that it's criminal
behavior. The issue is why the laws were put in place, why these
barriers were put in place.

Iraq didn't need to be introduced
to torture by James Steele. Steele is the subject of the new BBC
Arabic and Guardian Newspaper documentary James Steele: America's Mystery Man In Iraq which Ava and I reviewed Sunday
at Third. But what Steele and the American government did was betray
the proclamation of 'a new Iraq,' 'of a free Iraq.' There's no question
that the US government broke the law with Steele and that War Crimes
took place. But it's the results of those crimes, the aftermath, that
is why we have laws in place against torture. In 'new Iraq,' the US
sent James Steele in and allowed him to show the real face of
counter-insurgency. And these crimes became the norm in Iraq making
clear that there would be no 'new Iraq.' That's why the torture
continues to this day. The American occupation made it the norm and
gave it the stamp of approval. Amnesty's report notes:The
Ministry of Human Rights has gone some way towards acknowledging this
reality, observing that detainees are "subjected in some instances to
torture and ill-treatment in order to coerce them to confess or to
obtain information." Once they have "confessed" in this way, detainees
are generally taken under guard to appear before an investigating judge,
often under threat of further torture or other ill-treatment if they
refuse to confirm their confession or complain of mistreatment. In some
cases, detainees are reported to have been threatened or assaulted by
their guards in the presence of the investigating judge to force them to
confess. Investigating judges are supposed to ensure that any
incriminatory statements have been freely given, without coercion or
duress, yet cases continue to be reported where they appear to have
preferred to "look the other way" and accept self- incriminating
statements from detainees without question despite their allegations or
other evidence of abuse. This, when it occurs, may have profoundly
damaging consequences for the detainee. For example, the Central
Criminal Court in Baghdad [case number 1479 of 2012, Branch 2] ruled on 3
December 2012 that it would accept as evidence a confession made in
pre-trial detention by a defendant although that defendant "denied any
relation with the accusation brought against him and stated that his
previous confession in front of the investigating judge was not true as
it had been obtained by pressure and coercion that he was subjected to
by the investigator". The court said it found the confession acceptable
because it was "elaborate and detailed" [mufassal wa daqiq], then
convicted the defendant under the Anti-Terrorism Law and sentenced him
to life imprisonment. As experienced Iraqi criminal lawyers have
attested to Amnesty International, courts place great weight on
"confessions" recorded by investigating judges and tend to accept them
even though defendants withdraw and repudiate them at trial.

Torture
destroys the lives of the victims. It dehumanizes those who practice
it. And it destroys an open society. If you torture to get a
'confession' and it's false but you convict, you not only put the
innocent behind bars, you let the guilty walk. More importantly, the
lesson is absorbed in the society that truth and reality don't matter.
The people take the message, they understand what repression is and the
open society dies as does every freedom. That's what so many Iraqis taking to the streets to
protest for the last months are fighting against, the death of an open
society. They are fighting for that "new Iraq" that they were promised
but still haven't seen.